This book is different in five respects from other books
having the same purpose and target populations. This book truly stands
in a class by itself in terms of:

The Use of Excerpts

A total of 674 of excerpts--passages of text, tables,
and figures--have been reproduced from recently published journal articles.
An average of 32 excerpts per chapter are prominently displayed in boxes
throughout the book. Of the 674 excerpts, only 34 came from the 2nd edition.
These excerpts bring journal article content directly to the reader, thereby
making the rest of the book come alive. No other book provides its readers
with this vast array of authentic material.

The 674 excerpts were drawn from 223 different journals,
representing a highly diverse set of disciplines. To be more specific,
the excerpts came from research journals in these fields of study:

Education

Psychology

Children/Families

Business

Nursing

Sociology

Sports/Exercise

Medicine

Communication

Gerontology

Epidemiology

Hard Sciences

Alcohol/Violence

Gender Issues

Miscellaneous

(Click here for the names of journals supplying
the excerpts.)

The In-Depth Discussion of Hypothesis Testing

More pages (by far!) are devoted to hypothesis testing
than is the case in any other statistics book. This treatment covers the
steps, logic, and misuse of this popular form of inferential statistics.
Chapters 7, 8, and 9 (spanning pages 161-253) deal with this highly important
topic.

The Distinction Drawn Between "Statistical Significance"
and "Practical Significance"

Throughout a large portion of the book, attention is
drawn to the critically important distinction between "statistical
significance" and "practical significance." This was done
because many researchers get results that are meaningless despite being
statistically significance. Readers are warned here (more than in any
other book) that a "p<.05" result does not necessarily mean
the same thing as "important." The distinction between "beyond
chance" and "noteworthy" is discussed generally in Chapter
8 and in 12 other places when specific statistical tests are considered.